ABSTRACT
The daughter of Daniel and Julia Kiesel McGinley, Phyllis Louise McGinley was born in Ontario, on March 21, 1905. Her family soon moved to a ranch near Iliff, Colorado, where McGinley attended a small country school and read voraciously. She was writing verse by the time she was six, though her talent for humor did not emerge until she was an adult. With her father's death in 1917, she moved to her mother's family home in Ogden, Utah, where she attended Sacred Heart Academy and Ogden High School. At the University of Utah, from which she graduated in 1927, she won prizes for her essays, short stories, and poetry. While teaching school, she sent her work to New York magazines, and some of her poems were accepted. She moved to New Rochelle, New York, where she taught junior high school and continued to write. New Yorker fiction editor Katharine White encouraged her to inject more humor into her work.
